The Propelling Pencil: Two Hundred Years in Silver
The Propelling Pencil: Two Hundred Years in Silver
Our story begins in the workshops of a London locksmith.
In the early 1800s, a young silversmith named Sampson Mordan was serving his apprenticeship under Joseph Bramah, one of the great practical inventors of the age. Bramah had already patented the hydraulic press, the modern toilet, and a lock so famously unpickable that he displayed one in his shop window for 67 years with a standing offer of 200 guineas to anyone who could open it. Nobody collected until 1851. Mordan learned his craft in that atmosphere of relentless ingenuity, and it shaped everything that followed.
London in the 1820s was a small world for curious, ambitious men. Mordan moved in the same scientific circles as a young Michael Faraday, who was then working his way from bookbinder's apprentice to the laboratories of the Royal Institution. Both attended the City Philosophical Society, where self-educated Londoners gathered weekly to hear lectures on science and debate the ideas of the age. Faraday would go on to discover electromagnetic induction and transform the modern world. Mordan had a different, more tangible ambition: he wanted to redesign the pencil.
In 1822, working with co-inventor John Isaac Hawkins, Mordan filed the first British patent for a propelling pencil — a slim metal barrel containing a lead that could be advanced by twisting the end. No sharpening, no shortening stub, no mess. He bought out Hawkins shortly afterwards and entered into partnership with Gabriel Riddle, an established stationer, and they sold their silver pencils stamped with the initials SMGR. When that partnership dissolved in 1837 Mordan continued alone under the name S. Mordan & Co., expanding into silver and gold objects of every kind while the pencils remained at the heart of the business. His figural pencils cast in the shape of Egyptian mummies, pistols, foxes, jockeys on horseback are now among the most sought-after items in antique silver. He was also awarded the Large Silver Medal by the Royal Society of Arts in 1828 for inventing a self-centring lathe chuck, solving a production problem that had frustrated his own pencil factory.
Mordan died in 1843. His sons Sampson junior and Augustus carried on, and S. Mordan & Co. continued making silverware from its workshops until the night in 1941 when the Blitz reduced everything to rubble.
By then the story had already taken a new direction.
In 1934, a manufacturer named Brenner had gone into business with Frank Tuffnel, whose father had worked directly with Sampson Mordan. Between them they registered the official YARD-O-LED company, taking the name from the most precise description of what their pencils contained: a yard of lead, twelve individual three-inch segments loaded end to end in the barrel, each advancing automatically as the one before it was consumed. The name was factual to the point of being scientific, and entirely English.
The business survived the war. Both Brenner's factory and the old Mordan workshops were destroyed in the bombing, but YARD-O-LED re-established after 1945 in Birmingham, the heart of English silversmithing and home to the Assay Office that had regulated precious metalwork since 1773. In the 1950s the company acquired and merged with Edward Baker, another manufacturer with deep roots in fine writing instruments, and in doing so obtained the original Mordan patents. The lineage that had begun with Sampson Mordan in a Piccadilly workshop was now consolidated under one name, in one city, making the same object it had always made.
The pencils themselves have changed very little. The mechanism Mordan patented in 1822 a threaded barrel advancing a lead carriage remains the basis of every YARD-O-LED pencil today. The silver is still sterling, still engine turned by craftspeople in Birmingham using machines that are themselves antiques. The patterns cut into the surface the overlapping ovals of the barley, the fine parallel lines of the Victorian, the hand-hammered face of the Martelé are made by engine turning tools hand, never entirely identical from one piece to the next.
What Mordan understood, and what has proved correct across two centuries, is that a pencil made properly from the right materials has no natural lifespan. The graphite runs out, certainly. But the barrel, the mechanism, the silver itself — these do not wear out. They age in the way that good silver ages, acquiring a patina that records use rather than showing decay.
A yard of lead. Twelve segments, three inches each. The same today as it was in 1822, in the workshops of a silversmith who learned his trade from the man who invented the unpickable lock, while his friend across town was working out how electricity behaves.
Some starting points are hard to improve on.